What do you see? Spellbinding masterpiece door that led me to Caravaggio.

A glimpse of blue sky, a wisp of clouds, birds, cathedral and concrete buildings is what I see in painting along the hallway wall of Malta’s airport.  Looking at the mural makes me want to run outside and feel that … Continue reading →

Words

What is prayer?

You take words,
everyday words,
and all of a sudden they become holy.

Why?

Because there is something
that separates one word from
another and then you try to fill
the vacuum.

With what?
With whom?
With what memory?
With what aspiration?

So when words bring you closer
to the prisoner in his cell,
to the patient who is dying on his bed alone,
to the starving child,

then it’s a prayer.

words by Elie Wiesel

Whatever you do, don’t look at your phone, instead…

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“My mind echoes a chant: Don’t look at your phone. Whatever you do, don’t look at your phone. I sit alone on the bench, outside of a café as I wait for a friend. The lines on each passing face, … Continue reading →

Self-Portrait: Mended

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  Self-Portrait, Mended by Eleanor Hannan This piece is based on drawings done the day after 7-hour surgery to remove skin cancer from my nose. I chose to have only local anesthetic so as to be awake during the surgery. … Continue reading →

Be One With The Tree

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  The Tree of Contemplative Practices Mirabai Bush pointed us to this illustration of contemplative practices, which shows the breadth of meditation and mindfulness within traditions. Although this list isn’t comprehensive, it does open up one’s imagination about how these … Continue reading →

Transformation: Sit and Wait

Sit and Wait

I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
which shall be the darkness of God.
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
for hope would be hope for the wrong thing;
there is yet faith.
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
(T.S.Eliot – Four Quartets)

 

 

Source : The School of Meditation: Letter 12
Meditation is a universal spiritual wisdom. All traditions recognize the value of a contemplative practice and the need for the community that flows from it. The School of Meditation of The World Community for Christian Meditation supports this. To find out more about the World Community for Christian Meditation visit our main website www.wccm.org.

Poultry Philosophers

Photo: Simon Blackley/ Flickr

I like to contemplate deep thoughts such as What is the meaning of life? Why is the sky blue? Why did the chicken cross the road? Searching for answers via Google, these are some responses from the great thinkers.

Plato: For the greater good.

Karl Marx: It was an historical inevitability.

Nietzsche: Because if you gaze too long across the Road, the Road gazes also across you.

Jean-Paul Sartre: In order to act in good faith and be true to itself, the chicken found it necessary to cross the road.

Albert Einstein: Did the chicken cross the road or did the road move beneath the chicken?

Aristotle: To actualize its potential.

Buddha: If you ask this question, you deny your own chicken-nature.

Emily Dickinson: Because it could not stop for death. Epicurus: For fun.

Ralph Waldo Emerson: It didn’t cross the road; it transcended it.

Johann Friedrich von Goethe: The eternal hen-principle made it do it.

Ernest Hemingway: To die. In the rain.

Werner Heisenberg: We are not sure which side of the road the chicken was on, but it was moving very fast.

David Hume: Out of custom and habit.

Sappho: Due to the loveliness of the hen on the other side, more fair than all of Hellas’ fine armies.

Henry David Thoreau: To live deliberately … and suck all the marrow out of life.

Mark Twain: The news of its crossing has been greatly exaggerated.

Joseph Stalin: I don’t care. Catch it. Crack its eggs to make my omelette.

Captain James T. Kirk: To boldly go where no chicken has gone before.

Fox Mulder: You saw it cross the road with your own eyes. How many more chickens have to cross before you believe it?

Bill Clinton: I did not cross the road with THAT chicken. What do you mean by chicken? Could you define chicken, please?

The Bible:  And God came down from the heavens, and He said unto the chicken, “Thou shalt cross the road.”  And the chicken crossed the road, and there was much rejoicing.

Dr. Seuss: Did the chicken cross the road? Did he cross the toad? Yes! The chicken cross the road, but why it crossed the road, I’ve not been told!

Colonel Sanders:  I missed one?

In your opinion, why did the chicken cross the road?

I ponder myself in the cosmos

I walked with giants
And talked with ancestors
As I looked down the millennia
At the branching and twisting of the Tree of life
Immersed in Deep Time
I contemplate
My relatives, now extinct for aeons
And those who teeter on the edge today
I stand humbled
Heart heavy with grief
And ponder my place in the cosmos.

– Andrew Jones
(written after a visit to the Mammoths exhibition at Edinburgh museum 13/2/14)

Source: Carol in Africa

Temptation

Assisi overlooking Porzuincula

Every day the sun rises.  The light and the warmth of the sun give life to everyone and every living thing.  Not just the sun.  There’s the water, air and earth, they, too,  give freely.  They simply offer to us all that is good to sustain our well-being. There is no exception, no discrimination, and no judgement.

I am using these four elements as an analogy to how I can understand a scripture verse and apply it on my daily life.

“Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get. Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbor, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ while the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbor’s eye.”

I suppose I have to look at this more on a personal level.

First, I am not perfect therefore who am I to judge?  Second, maybe it would help me to put myself in the other person’s shoe.  How would I feel if I am the one being judge?  And finally, I think judging is a sign of weakness on my part.  And to put it in a facetious way, I can only imagine how ugly-looking I am should I have a “log” in my eye.

This verse reminded me about another verse “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.”  Again, I can imagine that there will be a lot of blind and toothless people running around the world.

Seriously, I need to hold back or bite my tongue no matter how tempting it is to be righteous.  This verse does not say anything about goodness or love but I believe this is the heart of it all.  It isn`t  easy to be as generous as the sun, water, air and earth but who says being a follower of Jesus would be easy?

Three days: Where did it go?

There is a gremlin in the system!

Did I ever share with you that I hate technology?  I do!  I blamed technology when the first sign of dark night of the soul surfaced.  I am overcoming this aversion to technology by joining Facebook followed by WordPress.  And I am making headways.  I’m still here after over a year of blogging.  That is a success on my part.

To prove that I can do it, I even moved to a dot-com to learn more what’s out there.  It was a challenge and still is.

Today, the challenge is the reader.  Going back to some post that I have neglected to read, I don’t see them.  The reader’s last post was three days ago.  Mind you, some of today’s read is visible.  Where did it go?

I dread of contacting the support forum once again for I have numerous e-mail going back and forth.  I must say they are very helpful.

Oh, the joys of technology.

Photo credit: Jemima’s Journal